I wouldn't call it a "trend". It's a theme. There has been space-themed metal and music in general since... I don't know, I'd say Bowie's Space Oddity in 1969 at least, off the top of my head. No one says that gore in dm/bdm/grind is a trend, and yet it's stale as can be just as well.

No one says that gore in dm/bdm/grind is a trend, and yet it's stale as can be just as well.

No one expects musicians within those genres to write about anything else neither. In this scene filled with pretentious musicians and pseudointellectual lyrics, it's more pathetic, at least from my perspective.

Written by LeKiwi on 26.08.2014 at 03:23I guess I should probably clarify at this point. The trend for these overproduced and plastic cover arts based within the theme of space is becoming stale.

I can get on board with the cover art issue, but not the lyrical content. No one expects death metal bands to write about anything other than death and gore? I beg to differ. Spend some time using Metal-Archives' advanced search options and you'll see plenty of cross-contamination.

Musicians can't win these days. You complain about pretentiousness yet if these guys chose to write straightforward old school death metal you'd just complain that they aren't trying anything new.

I can get on board with the cover art issue, but not the lyrical content. No one expects death metal bands to write about anything other than death and gore? I beg to differ. Spend some time using Metal-Archives' advanced search options and you'll see plenty of cross-contamination.

Musicians can't win these days. You complain about pretentiousness yet if these guys chose to write straightforward old school death metal you'd just complain that they aren't trying anything new.

I didn't realise that Ilham also mentioned death metal in her comment. As for brutal death and grind, I don't think there's that much variation in lyrical content (and grindcore.)

Edit: actually had a look into death metal as well, and it seems to be pretty consistent between a few common themes as with the previously mentioned genres.

Totally ignoring the comments above, I'll say that this album is excellent. I'm typically not a fan of the vocal style but Daniel Tompkins is something else. This band has incredibly talented musicians.

Sorry for the nearly double-comment, but good god, this is one of my new favorite finds.

I'm shifting my rating from 8 to 9. Man this was one of the difficult listens lately. There's just too much to digest! But loving the the arrangements. Except the last song, which I still can't decide, length of every track is apt, and the passages flow into each other so perfectly!

Either way, how do you differentiate Progressive Math Metal and Math Metal? I would be grateful if someone throws in examples.

Regardless of whether this is prog math or not this is an easy way to visualise the fusion: take prog metal and add math metal tendencies (in most cases on this website this refers to erratic poly-rhythms as heard in djent and math metal.)